On July 30 Senate Finance Committee Democrats issued an 86-page Request for Information (RFI) titled, “Health Coverage That Works for Everyone.” As Ranking Democratic Member Ron Wyden explained, much like the Finance Committee’s 2008 white papers that laid the groundwork for the ACA, this RFI constitutes an essential blueprint for necessary and immediate federal healthcare reform.
Surprisingly - or not, beyond a limited number of trade publications and policy shops the RFI has to date been ignored.
The authors 167-page paper make essentially two arguments: while the Ds diagnosis is correct in that part of the problem is how commercial insurers (termed “Big Insurance”) make money (and how much), nearly half of the RFI’s 71 propose reforms will likely cause payers to move money to unregulated subsidiaries or affiliates instead of saving it or applying the savings to actual care spending; and, by ignoring hospital prices, that substantially are responsible for both health care spending and inflation (once again think: “It’s the Prices, Stupid”), the Senate Finance Ds are ignoring over $300 billion in potential annual savings. E.g., they write, “squeeze insurer margin perfectly and the hospital price base is exactly where it was,” and “you cannot audit the pricing power of the party [hospitals] you have just cast as the injured one.”
The report deserves the attention of all serious healthcare policy students.
The authors’ work, published as INET working paper, is at: Alvelda-Ferguson-Wyden-RFI-Critique-Brainworks-INET-final.pdf.
INET is at: https://www.ineteconomics.org/.
Professor Ferguson’s bio is at: https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/experts/tferguson.
Dr. Alvelda’s bio is at: https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/experts/pAlvelda and at: https://brainworks.ai/about-us/.
